Your Right to Know

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoLogan Riely | Dispatch photoJim Stiver, a retired teacher from Middletown, said Gov. John Kasich is “very greedy” and that he won’t vote to re-elect the Republican governor.

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — They might not have heard much about Ed FitzGerald in this southwestern Ohio
city, but they do know one thing.

“He’s not (Gov. John) Kasich,” as Joe Wittman put it.

And that’s good news for the Cleveland Democrat who wants Kasich’s job.

In contrast to the Buckeye bellwether featured last month in
The Dispatch — where almost no one contacted in heavily Democratic northeastern Ohio’s
Streetsboro knew about FitzGerald and were for Kasich by default — hostility for the GOP governor
was common among voters in the heart of Ohio’s most-Republican area. That could be in part because
the heart of GOP-leaning southwestern Ohio is Middletown, which is a blue-collar, industrial city
and more evenly split politically.

Kasich “is too pro-big corporations and too pro-big money,” said Whitman, 54, a marine surveyor
who also is vice president of the local NAACP. “What made Ohio great in the past was unions,
workers’ rights and a very strong middle class, which has been depleted over the years.”

However, his wife, Sue, is trying to reconcile her progressive leanings with the fact that —
under the Kasich administration — the Art Central Foundation that she directs (and for which her
husband is a board member) got state money.

Those state dollars included a grant to help install an elevator in the three-story Pendleton
Art Center, a renovated 1883 building amid several empty downtown storefronts in the once-bustling
manufacturing hotbed.

“I can’t say for sure,” the 52-year-old said on whether Kasich or FitzGerald will get her
vote.

Inside the art center, Chris Henry ate lunch at the Pendleton Cafe by
Two Women in a Kitchen. He was disappointed that Kasich killed proposed high-speed
passenger rail service across Ohio, for which Middletown already had cleared a lot and planned
improvements for a train station.

“Kasich’s done some good things in office, but that wasn’t one of them,” said Henry, 47. But
since he hasn’t heard much about FitzGerald, the small-business owner said he remains
undecided.

His former history teacher, Jim Stiver, says he won’t vote for the governor.

Stiver, 65, retired in 2006 after 30 years in Middletown public schools. He helps run the
biweekly Broad Street Bash, which closes streets around the art center and attracts up to 4,500
people with bands, food trucks and beer.

“What Kasich did with Senate Bill 5 really ticked me off and got me fired up,” he said,
referring to the 2011 measure backed by Kasich that would have slashed collective-bargaining rights
for state and local government workers. Voters soundly rejected it.

But the governor won support from one of the first arrivals at the last week’s bash, Lori Wendt,
44, a cost controller at a local concrete construction company who remembers shopping trips
downtown as a child and going to her prom in a historic hotel.

“I’m a single mom who goes to work every day and pays my bills,” she said. “I think from what I’m
seeing, Ohio is turning around.”

Wendt said she likes what she has heard on Kasich’s TV ads about his role in balancing the
federal budget in the late 1990s and closing a multibillion-dollar state shortfall without a net
state tax increase after he became governor.

“Being a financial person, that’s awesome,” she said. “We need to learn to live within our
income.”

Gerald “Hap” Risner, 87, a retiree entering the local Moose lodge, said he appreciates the tax
cuts Kasich helped implement.

“I am definitely planning on voting for the governor,” Risner said. “He’s done a good job, as
far as I can tell.”